On Sun, Dec 22, 2002 at 09:32:50PM +1100, Rob Weir wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 17, 2002 at 01:13:18PM -0500, Vikki Roemer wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 17, 2002 at 11:36:58AM +0100, Matthias Hentges wrote:
> > > Am Die, 2002-12-17 um 04.02 schrieb Vikki Roemer:
> > > > On Tue, Dec 17, 2002 at 12:14:10AM +0100, Matthias Hentges wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > You may want to try a strace of su:
> > > > >
> > > > > $ strace su
> > > > >
> > > > > Most of the times you will find your answer with strace.
> > > > >
> > > >
> > > > Man, that's a cool program! I ought to run that more often. :)
>
> Oh yeah. There's also 'ltrace' which lets you trace functions calls
> through your libraries as well.
Ooh, cool! Hmm, I've got to dig around the system and see what else I
have...
>
> > > Strace is nice to check if some lib is missing or some file is lost
> > > (or if some device can not be opened etc).
> >
> > Oh. See, looking at it from a programming/hacking point of view, it
> > struck me as being a really good tool to analyze programs and the
> > OS. :)
>
> Definitely. It's just another reason that Unix-style OS's are far, far,
> far better tools than Windows (and any other OS I can think of) to learn
> about programming/design/kernels/etc...
Heck yeah, man. I mean, Linux at least (I've only used Linux and
Windows, so far), you can tear apart the system and see what exactly
(in gruesome, gory detail) makes it tick, you know? And if you can't
figure out enough from the documentation and the output of programs
like strace, you can always get at the source.
Unlike Windows, which AFAIK doesn't even *have* programs like strace.
Forget about the source. *rolls eyes*
It's funny, there are 2 programmers in my family-- me and my dad. He
programs on Windows and doesn't have much of a problem with it,
although the bugginess is starting to get to him. But VB is his 'pet
language'. Me, I program on Linux, hate Windows because of the
bugginess and the fact that I have no chance of *fixing* any of the
bloody bugs (at least with Linux, you can report the bugs and the
developer will probably listen to you; if not, you can take the
source, fix it yourself, teaching yourself the language if need be).
The languages I like best are C and Lisp, and I hate VB because you
can't see all the code; personally, I don't trust the compiler to
write good code. But anyway...
>
> Also, you should have man pages for all the functions installed too. If
> you want to know what execve does, for instance, just 'man execve' to
> find out exactly what it does. If you need more context, Google is your
> bestest buddy in the whole wide world. Especially look for university
> course notes, since they seem to have the best (and least
> vendor-specific) documentation.
Hmm, I didn't know that about course notes. I'll remember that.
Thanks.
> > Ok. I just edited the file. Hopefully there's nothing that gives too
> > much information about the system...
> >
> > No offense, it's not that I don't trust you or anyone else *in
> > particular*, I just don't entirely trust everybody in general.
>
> It's just common sense. Putting your root password on the
> lists.debian.org archives is asking for trouble :)
Right, exactly. I just didn't know if anything else harmful was in
the file or not. And some people tend to take things the wrong way.
I've been getting in trouble for that lately... :(
--
Vikki Roemer Homepage: http://compgrokker.tripod.com/
Registered Linux user #2880021 http://counter.li.org/
"Quod scripsi, scripsi." [Latin, "What I have written, I have written."]
PGP fingerprint: 0A3E 0AE4 CCD9 FF31 B4BB C859 2DE1 B1D8 5CE0 1578
Keyserver: http://pgp.mit.edu/
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